Follow by Email

Thursday, 1 January 2015

Making an album, part 5: In search of the perfect pop song

One fine
morning a few weeks ago, I emerged from sleep with a tune in my head. The tune
was ‘Late for the train’, the final track on ‘Love Bites’, the second album by
the English post-punk band Buzzcocks. The
imprint of that tune, deeply encoded on some neglected neural pathway, provoked
an early-morning flashback so vivid and poignant that -for a brief instant- I
was once again a spotty teenager in love with that band and their music. The tantalising,
sleep-charged echo of ‘Late for the train’ fooled the adult me into believing
that he was the teenaged me, a kid buffeted by the turbulence of hopes, fears
and passions that he hoped would somehow propel him through an exciting world
of possibilities. Alas, the tangibility of the moment was all-too-brief and I
was soon back in the present, wide awake to the fact that I’m an adult
comfortably tethered to my responsibilities. The flashback,
however, had reminded me once more of how potent pop music can be. Like the
powerful scent of cheap perfume, even the tawdriest manufactured pop ditty has
the potential to evoke powerful memories. It can make you smile, laugh or cry;
it can make you remember people, places and things. I like pop music more than
I like any other art form.At its best, I
believe the popular song to be one of humankind’s great achievements, because something
wonderful and transcendent happens within certain intoxicating combinations of
rhythm, melody, notes, voices and words. Pop music, in that sense, is capable
of achieving artistic perfection, although it would be difficult for any two
people to agree on a definition of perfect pop; some might even argue that
there is no such thing.

But
let’s assume for the moment that ‘perfection’ is possible; what would the
ingredients of a perfect pop song be? At
the risk of stating the obvious, it has to be popular; it can’t be too
alternative, too under-the-radar. It shouldn’t
overstay its welcome and should probably be able to accommodate mainstream
tastes. It can be breezy (like 'I get around'by The Beach Boys) or menacing
(like 'Every breath you take'by The Police), but definitely not dreary. It can be populist and perhaps even a bit lightweight; it should be catchy, but
not annoyingly so. 'Itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini' is catchy,
but it’s catchy in the same way that scabies is catchy.

A great pop song can be very much of its time, but should
also have that elusive element of timelessness. You shouldn’t have to say: ‘you had to be there’ or ‘you had to be on such-and-such a drug’
to appreciate a truly perfect pop song. Some songs are so closely identified with
the era from which they emerged that they are eulogised mainly by the folk who
lived through their glorious flowering; others rise above their milieu to
achieve greatness. 'Smoke gets in your eyes' by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach is
a wonderful song that was written for a musical in the 1930s, but you don’t
need to have seen the show or to have lived through that decade in order to
appreciate it. 'Penny Lane' by the Beatles evokes a very particular time and
place, but you don’t have to have lived in Liverpool in the 1960s to know that
it is a great pop tune. In many cases, you don’t even need to understand the
lyrics to appreciate a great song. 'Sir
Duke' by Stevie Wonder waxes lyrical about the contribution that black artists
have made to American popular culture, but you don’t need to ‘get’ the words to
be moved by the joy and genius in the music.

If pushed to come up with a definition, I’d suggest
that perfect pop happens when there is a magical alchemy between words, rhythm,
melody, voice and structure. A perfect pop song is probably something to which
nothing could be added or taken away to improve it.

So what has any of this got to do with me?

At this time last year, I wrote about my intention to record
an album. Although I have not yet managed to complete this task, I’m probably
about 65% of the way there. The project has taken some unexpected twists and
turns and I’ve already changed my mind several times about songs, themes and
the album title. I’ve narrowed the contenders down to sixteen songs and each
of these is partly recorded, with some of them just about finished and others
requiring a bit more work. Once that work is done, I’ll pick the twelve songs
that sound to me like they will make most sense as a collection.Within this
body of work, it would be ridiculous for me to claim that I have the remotest
chance of creating a ‘perfect’ pop song. With respect to the criteria listed above, it’s
clear that I can’t qualify in many of the categories. None of my songs are
going to be ‘popular’, because very few people are going to get to hear them;
none of my songs are going to remind anyone of an important time in their life;
none of my songs will provide the soundtrack to anyone’s dream. There is not a
single spotty teenager on the planet who will think that anything I write will
encapsulate the equivalent feelings of lust, rebellion, restlessness,
excitement and wonder that I felt when listening to that Buzzcocks tune.

So why
bother? I’ve asked myself this question many times and, if I had to boil the
answer down to a single notion, it would be this: Let’s suppose I found a piece
of driftwood on the beach and decided to take it home and sculpt something
interesting out of it. Suppose I then decided to make an objet d’art for my
garden. This artefact would be required to serve no other purpose than to
sit somewhere and be pleasing on the eye. I might spend ages on this project –
filing, carving, whittling, scraping, gouging and maybe some other associated words
that you’ll find under ‘sculpt’ in a thesaurus. The process of creating that artefact would be
rewarding in and of itself. The number of folk who’d get to see or appreciate
my garden sculpture would be more or less irrelevant. If only a few friends and
relatives ever got to see it, that would be fine with me.

Accordingly,
my satisfaction with making music resides in the peace that comes with the imagining
act, the execution of creative impulses, the feeling of having brought a new
thing into the world. It matters little if I am the only one who can hear
beauty in any of these songs. When I listen, I can also hear the process and
the goal; I hear echoes of everything else I have ever listened to; I hear inchoate
ideas rescued from formlessness by the building blocks of melody and rhythm, random
promiscuous scatterings of notes and chords arranged into order and harmony. From
the chaos of noise and purposelessness, I hear the shaping of disparate elements
into a brief illusion of meaning, into three and a half minutes in which the
universe appears to make sense.

There
are a couple of songs I’m working on for my album which –in my head at least-
have the makings of ‘perfect’ pop songs, as long as we extend a generous definition
of the word perfect to include ‘well-constructed songs that don’t actually make
you feel physically sick’.

I started work on this song -If she gets on my train- with
the intention of writing something upbeat and life-affirming. It tried its best
for a while, but has somehow ended up with a sting in the tail. The lyric tries
to get inside the head of a guy who nurses a crush on a girl he sees every
day when he commutes to work. At one point I imagined that there would be a happy
ending, with him asking the girl out and them both living happily ever after,
but I never got around to completing that draft; by the time I returned to the
lyric, it seemed more appropriate to insert a twist. The protagonist is trying
to imagine a situation in which he will have the courage to make an approach to
the girl of his dreams, but with every situation he imagines (she gets on his
train, she walks down his street) there is also the recognition that all he
will ever do is continue to do what he has always done. He knows that he will
never pluck up the courage to ask the girl out, so settles instead for
running little fantasy scenarios in his head.

When I let a friend hear a version of this a few months ago,
he suggested that I hadn’t quite nailed the ending. This led me to return to
the recording with the idea of emphasizing the character’s haplessness in the
fadeout. Rather than let him fantasize about the life he might lead with this
mystery girl, the extent of his detachment from reality would be delineated by
his repetition of the line ‘if she gets on my train, we could have a
conversation’.By this point in the
song, we know that he is not going to be having any conversation with that
girl. In that sense, the fadeout is a little nod to the chilling climax of Terry
Gilliam’s dystopian nightmare ‘Brazil’, in which the audience is led to believe
that the hero (played by Jonathan Pryce) has escaped the rapacious clutches of
the Big Brother state and is living in bliss with his sweetheart.The big reveal comes when we discover that he
is, in fact, tied to a chair and under brutal interrogation; so complete is his
abandonment of his awful reality that he has retreated to a safe place inside
his head where he can run his fantasies even as the state thugs are pulling his
nails out with pliers.

As is often the case, the failure seemed more interesting than
the success.

About Me

A few years ago, I promised that I would never start a blog; this is it.
On this blog, I plan to respond to real (or imagined) slights by posting coruscating put-downs of my enemies, competitors and -occasionally- friends. I also plan to maintain the acrimonious simmering of a series of longstanding grudges and petty disputes.
But mainly, the blog will faithfully record a pointless and pedestrian series of idle musings, attempted libels and ill-considered theories about popular culture, sport, politics, music and the meaning of life.
For the last couple of years, I've been writing about an album I'm recording; yes, it's nearly finished.
The views represented on this blog are not necessarily endorsed by the author, unless they are.